Experts aim to keep seniors safe from scams

The National Council on Aging calls financial scams targeting senior citizens "the crime of the 21st Century."

Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez -- who headed up a panel from the construction, insurance, automobile repair and law enforcement industries at the Murrieta Public Library last week -- said this type of exploitation of the elderly can't be tolerated.

"Taking advantage of our seniors is something we have to stop ... immediately," she said. "It's terribly important to the folks who live in this community that they keep their money in their pockets, their life savings in their bank accounts, and that somebody doesn't come and swindle them out of it."

Murrieta residents Ruth Carter, 80, and Ken Herring, 72, attended the seminar. Both of them said they use caller ID to screen their calls at home to avoid telemarketers.

"If we don't know them, we just let it ring," said Herring, a retired heavy machinery operator.

Peter Meza is a compliance officer with the Department of Insurance who served on the panel. He said unscrupulous insurance agents target senior citizens with sophisticated-sounding pitches for financial products they don't need, such as annuities.

Meza explained that those types of investment products are not designed for people in their 70s or 80s.

"It takes what they call maturity time," Meza said. "You put money in and it takes 10 years, 15 years, whatever, to get" it out.

According to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2010 -- households of people 65-and-older possessed about one-third of the wealth in the U.S. Households age 65 to 74 controlled 19.3 percent, and households age 75-and-over controlled 13.9 percent. Those statistics are not lost on chislers, con men and crooks.

Tracking those people and informing the public about their predatory practices has kept Jane Kreidler, an outreach coordinator with the Public Affairs Office of the Contractors State License Board, quite busy. She estimated that last year she did about 50 seminars like this.

Most of the fraud in the construction industry is perpetrated by unlicensed contractors, Kreidler said. She said they will monitor a neighborhood, determine where the elderly live and then knock on the door and make their pitch.

There are a couple of scams related to construction work. Some operators demand excessive down payments, then never come back. Others receive payment then abandon the job before it's done.

Kriedler said these unlicensed contractors prefer verbal agreements to contracts, and getting paid in cash.

Another panelist, Robert Snyder of the Bureau of Automotive Repair, said that if a person is having a hard time understanding what an auto mechanic is saying, ask them to explain it to you again. And if concerns or reservations persist, he said, "Don't be afraid to say, 'No.'"

"I want you to be wiser," Snyder said. "I don't want you to spend money on things you don't understand."